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You’ve probably taken advantage of an offer like this yourself, at least once in your life. The free trial offer allows the customer to try out the product for a limited amount of time to see if they like it before they have to pay for it. This kind of offer instills confidence in the customer because they can try before they buy to make sure the product will perform the way it is supposed to. Although free trial offers are often used to market software, you can use this type of pricing strategy to market a variety of products and services.

Some Free Trial Offers Require Credit Card Information

Some free trial offers require the customer to enter credit card information so that their account will automatically be charged if they do not cancel after the free trial period expires. This is probably the way most free trial offers work because marketers feel they have a better chance of keeping the customer if the customer has to do nothing for the offer to continue. Alternatively, if you do not require credit card information up front, then the customer may use the product or service for the free trial period and then never enter their credit card information in order to continue. Also, since many customers may not have a credit card or even a debit card, they won’t be able to continue with the product or service past the free trial offer anyway.

It is completely up to you as to which strategy you want to use however, with today’s economic dynamic, it is not difficult for customers to obtain prepaid debit cards that they can use to shop online. So even if they don’t have one to begin with, if they want your product or service bad enough, they can usually obtain one. You might even try split testing the offer to see how many customers you can retain by offering the free trial offer with and without requiring credit or debit card information.

Some Free Trial Offers Offer Limited Functionality

Often, free trial offers provide only limited functionality, especially if the product is a software product. Customers who use the free trial version may not be able to do all the things the paid version offers. This is also often the case with membership sites where the free version offers a limited access. Look closely at the products and services you are marketing to see whether or not your business could benefit from offering a free trial version of whatever it is you have to offer. This can be a great way to bring in new customers who may not be sure your product will meet their needs. Letting them try it for free, even with limited functionality, provides a valuable service to customers and opens the door for you to gain more customers.

While some of the products you may create will cost you nothing but a huge amount of time, and maybe even some blood, sweat, and tears, you will undoubtedly pour money into other creations with the hope of recouping your investment in addition to a tidy profit. Before you can accurately price your products, you’ll need to consider how much they have cost you to create. Just as the cost of baking a cake can be arrived at by adding up the cost of all the ingredients, you may have several different types of cost to consider before you can arrive at the accurate amount of your initial investment.

Time

What is your time really worth anyway? How do you go about placing a dollar value on your time? Some Internet marketers like to be able to measure their work by earning so much per hour while others like to earn so much per job. However, if all you put into a job is essentially time and hard work, how do you gauge the value of the work? These are questions you will need to answer as you go about figuring the pricing of a product that involves a great deal of time. However, there are other expenses to consider as well.

Overhead

Even though you may be working from your own home you still have overhead to consider. You may or may not have any employees to pay but you most likely have a mortgage payment or rent, and utilities to consider. You might even be paying for the equipment you use to do your job so all of this must be taken into consideration when you set your prices for your products.

Sometimes, you may set your price in such a way in order to get some quick cash. Other times, you may be more interested in obtaining and retaining long term customers. It’s important to realize that your prices may change as your own needs change so you will want to be aware of your present goals when you price your products.

Money

Now if you have laid out cold, hard cash to produce your products, you most certainly need to recoup your investment plus make a profit on top of that. When this is the case, you might decide to go with a simple markup pricing protocol. That just means you take your cost and mark the product up a certain percentage over cost in order to arrive at the final price. There really is no certain markup standard; some Internet marketers mark up their products as much as 100% or more; others only mark them up a small percentage. One thing is for sure; there is no sure thing when it comes to pricing your products and you will most likely need to test any system you decide to use to make sure it is the best pricing protocol for you and your customers.